State Press podcast transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. The official record for State Press podcasts is the audio. Please listen to the audio as this transcript may only contain summary forms of the given episode.
Connor Greenwall:
Welcome back to the podcast, I'm Connor Greenwall.
Grace Johnson:
And I'm Grace Johnson. We are so excited to be back here in Tempe. People are on campus, Palm Walk is busy,
football's back, and ASU's back.
Connor Greenwall:
And most importantly, the State Press podcast is back. But you might notice a few key changes to the podcast this semester. We're gonna do more features, more narrative stories, and we're gonna add some video elements as well.
Grace Johnson:
And you guys will notice we're gonna try and get some more voices on here we're gonna have a bunch of different hosts and personalities all embedded into our podcast but anyways he's Connor Greenwall I'm Grace Johnson and this is State Press Play.
Joahan Lopez:
What's up state press play listeners, I'm Johan Lopez and we got a heck of a segment for you guys. We all have been seeing the same number one in innovation signs all over the valley and in this segment we find out what that actually means. To answer that question we got to take you back to 2002.
That was the summer when Michael Crow came in and took the reins to become the 16th president of ASU. Right around that time, Playboy magazine, yes, the Hugh Hefner brand ranked ASU as the number one party school in all of America. But now, fast forward to 2025.
ASU is number one in innovation and the school flaunts it even name dropping other schools like Stanford and MIT. In this segment, we got two state press writers to help us figure out what exactly does number one in innovation mean and what led ASU to go from a glorified party school to a university that leads the U .S. in innovation? We got great insight by Natalia Vargas and Grace Lawrence, those two who are actually talented writers.
We love those articles and hope you enjoy.
Joahan Lopez:
All right, let's do this. We are here with Grace Lawrence and this is her first semester actually, actually like ever in college just graduated high school and she's already writing for The State Press so tell me how do you end up writing for The State Press so early in your career?
Grace Lawrence:
That's a hard question I will say it like I don't know I just always loved writing and I was just following The State Press on Instagram as you do as like a hopeful college student and they said they were taking applications so I was like why not try and so I applied they were blown away by me and were kind of shocked that I wanted to apply as a freshman but then now I'm here.
Joahan Lopez:
That's awesome. Yeah that's super cool yeah you're so you're way ahead of the game you know everybody comes here when they're like kind of getting used to you know journalism but you're like on it and all that so hey congrats you're gonna have a I can tell you're gonna have a great career you have another four years yeah not to you know not like me I'm about to graduate so different things but yeah so we're gonna talk about the cool you wrote which is should be coming out soon called number one in innovation right yeah the truth about being number one innovation yeah so how do you end up you know is this your first article you're ever writing for The State Press.
Grace Lawrence:
Um yes this is my first
To hear more from Grace, please tune in to State Press Play.
Joahan Lopez:
All right, we are here with Natalia Rodriguez to talk about her article that she written in April of 2025 called Party School No More. Students weigh in on ASU stats in 2025. Natalia, how are we doing today?
Natalia Rodriguez:
I'm doing good, I'm excited. This is my first podcast.
Joahan Lopez:
Really? Well, it's an honor. You're a hell of a writer, super fun writer. So this is gonna be pretty much a story about how, you know, ASU is not what used to be. I'll say what I took from your article and pretty much that, you know, Crow came in, right? And he kind of changed things up, right? At a time, 2002, according to, was it Playboy Magazine? It was that ASU was the number one party school, From there he in within like two years. He got rid of like frat row He kind of you know made as you into what is known today as number one in innovation now that so tell me like what was your You know, what was your process like of writing that story? How'd he come up with that and just anything you can say about that story?
Natalia Rodriguez:
Yeah, I guess I'm not even really a big partier. So it's kind of funny that I Went to write this but it was just something I had thought of especially I lived in Tempe my freshman year, so I got to experience more of that party culture I'd say in Tempe. I think it's really different from downtown. So I guess that's kind of where it stemmed from and honestly, I would just be walking around campus and just talk to anyone who would be willing to talk to me. Sometimes when you do like man on the streets, a lot of people don't care and they're just going to move on, but I feel like this was a topic that a lot of people feel like they have something to say. So that's kind of where it came and like the sourcing behind it You know so you interview a lot of entry people you interview people that do you go out and party and you interview people that are you know Kind of like homebody, which is totally okay. I'm all body. You know that so what you know.
To hear more from Natalia, please tune in to State Press Play.
Connor Greenwall:
That's all for this week's State Press Play. I'm Connor Greenwall.
Grace Johnson:
And I'm Grace Johnson. State Press Play is produced by our podcast desk editor Connor Greenwall and our vid-pod producer Grace Johnson. Our original music is by Ellie Willard and Jake LaRoe.
Connor Greenwall:
Special Thanks to our managing team, Matthew Marengo and Ava Peguese.
Grace Johnson:
You can check out all these stories and more on StayPress.com. See y'all next week.
Joahan Lopez is in his final semester at Cronkite, majoring in Sports Journalism, his second semester as a podcast reporter!
